MOON EXPRESS

Moon Express is a company in California. They are explorers of the Moon hoping to win the Google Lunar X Prize by land-ing on the Moon and finding valuable minerals. But Moon Express is only 1 group out of 29 groups competing for the prize of $20 million dollars.

The ILO-X

Photo illustrations: Moon Express

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The Moon is watching us!

TODAY I WANT to tell you about a project that will greatly change our lives! What if your Astronomy teacher could talk to you from the Moon? Soon this idea will not seem so strange. There are many groups of people today who believe that we humans should be able to live on more than one planet.

The first step in reaching this goal is a really small object that is going to be looking far into space from the Moon. It is a little telescope no bigger than a shoe box! It was made by Moon Express with the help of the International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA). The little telescope already has a name: ILO-X. (See the first photo on the right.) The ILO-X will scan the endless universe of space for us and send us photos of galaxies, stars, planets, the Moon and Earth. The telescope will be working along with earth telescopes and will be controlled from our home, Earth. The photos and research will be available to everyone on the internet. The ILO-X is actually one of two telescopes. The other telescope is called ILO-1. One telescope will be a radio telescope and the other an optical (seeing) telescope.

The second step is much more interesting. It will be tiny robot that will search for water and other minerals on the South Pole of the Moon. The International Lunar Observatory (ILO) will travel to the Moon on a robot lander made by Moon Express. Its two-meter dish antenna will look into places in the universe that are now uncharted—that is, not mapped. This small, but very complicated system, will be put on a hill named the Malapert Crater on the South Pole. The hill is about 5 kilometers (3 miles) high. The temperature is about -50 degrees C. (-58 degrees F.) below zero. At the South Pole there is sunlight 90% of the time. That means that the temperature won’t change much and harm the equipment. People hope that by 2015 we will see the first photos and videos from the South Pole of Moon.

If water is found on the Moon, in 2017 or 2018 Moon Express and the ILOA will try to send people to live on the Moon for five years! But they will need to collect more than $100 million dollars to make this happen.

Dr.Surprise

(We follow the standard used by NASA in capitalizing the words Earth and Moon.)